Teachers’ perception of professional development in coding education

Abstract

With the wave of learning programming brought by Wing (2006), spurred by recent development and advancement of technologies, programming education in all k-12 stages has garnered much attention from researchers, teachers, school leaders, government. At the same time, there is a growing demanding in popularize professional development for programming education. Which would allow for further school participation in introducing computational participation into primary school. However, there is not much professional development programs organized for teaching programming in primary school. Essentially, this study aimed at bridging those research gaps. It asked two primary questions: firstly, from in-service primary school teachers’ perspective, what are the challenges in-service primary school teachers who in charge of teaching programming? Secondly, what is the expected professional development program from in-service teachers’ perspective? The theoretical foundation that underpins this study is based on the computational thinking theory and professional development theory. From these corresponding theories, this would allow for the formulation of designing of questionnaire which would answer two research questions ex. The designed questionnaire is adopted from two widely-used measurement developed by Hunzicker (2010) and Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, and Birman (2002). The designed questionnaire contains 65 items, which takes around five minutes for each participants to answer. For further understanding and triangulating the survey data, an interview was deployed. One participant who is coordinator in a Hong Kong primary school was interviewed in this study. The context in which this research is to be undertaken is in mainland China, Hong Kong, Brunei Darussalam. 107 participants in total involved in this research. The result of this study shows that 1) some primary school teachers still have misunderstanding on the concept of computational thinking. 2) lack of pedagogical content knowledge and content knowledge are major challenges teachers have in teaching programming. 3) by often, the reason of teachers with teaching programming experience do not attend professional development is having got little information about it. 4) non-cognitive factors, such as anxiety, confidence, always influence teachers’ teaching which cannot be neglected. 5) Teachers expect the professional development within one week, 0.5 to 1.5 hours per session, 7-10 sessions in total. 6) teachers think the best sector to organize professional development is Education Bureau (or local government) or university. 7) teachers are willing to participate follow-up activities which apply what they learnt and receive the feedback from peers and school leaders. 8) School leaders hold positive attitude on collaborative learning among teachers. 9) most of teachers think they did not receive enough support for teaching .10) In order to introduce programming course into school, school culture plays a critical role.